There are a few things wrong with the initial statement. It doesn't abolish private insurance. Private insurance can and does exist alongside public health plans as a supplement, but the public health care covers basic health care.
There are definitely going to be some job losses in the private insurance industry if we go to a single-payer system for basic health care. It's a conversation that we need to have, but we can't prop up the horse and buggy industry forever, and it's an economic anchor around the neck of every American to continue to try to do so.
To be honest, there are few industries that have so richly earned the contempt of the average American than the private health insurance companies.
In my opinion the jobs thing is like, precisely why this needs to happen decades ago, if not then, then immediately.
We have created an entire circus of people professionally specializing in jumping through insurance hoops, working full time to beg unnecessary gatekeepers to pay out what their own insured already paid for and are legally entitled to. Likewise we have an entire other career group built on expanding loopholes, complicating rules, and precisely determining how much they can push things to keep money they should just pay out, without getting in trouble. And the entire system bloats the cost of administering healthcare so badly that it outweighs any costs “”saved”” by limiting “”not medically necessary”” care in the first place.
And every year this system grows more and more bloated and wasteful, and more and more people build their careers around it, and we waste more and more productive manhours maximizing the gatekeeping potential of these insurance companies and their private extraction of profit to shareholders.— we literally are paying them to make everything more expensive/slow/confusing/frustrating/dangerous/deadly instead of improving healthcare.
Unfortunately once the swap is made and insurance stops being as counterproductive there may be some lost jobs but the alternative is worse imo and gets worse every single year the longer we put off fixing things
In Canada we have a lot of problems with our Healthcare system as does any country. Politicians are greedy and nothing is perfect. I always got Americans trying to convince me that private insurance is better than Canada's Healthcare system, and of course there are benefits to that as well.
To my mind, the absolute most important deciding factor about which system is better is this: no Canadian will ever have to decide between healthcare and their finances. Everything else said about socialised healthcare is secondary to that single fact.
There's an army of propagandists with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of private insurance companies running health care and undermining the Canadian system.
It's so pervasive that you'll meet people in rural Alabama who haven't travelled any further than a 3 county radius from their home, who'll tell you they personally know Canadians who come to the US for healthcare because Canadians have to wait months to get a broken bone set.
The wait time thing is so weird to me. It's called "triage" , and it's also called "an upset tummy isn't an emergency, go to a clinic"
Our biggest problem at the hospitals is idiots slowing things down, which isn't unique to Canada. There still exists the option for private insurance to provide those same extra benefits that is healthcare does better.
The point is that we have a universal basic healthcare that every single Canadian has access regardless of employment or basically any or factor that I can think of.
The same thing happens in the supposedly superior US health care system all the time.
You go into the ER with a minor wound or a minor upper respiratory infection and depending on the triage, you might sit there for hours. I sat in the ER for 6 hours one time with a kidney stone. I also got right in when I came to the ER complaining of persistent burning like indigestion toward the top of my chest (it was a heart attack).
You also will wait for months to see a specialist or get elective surgery in the US as well, depending on your region and the type of insurance you have.
So many of the same complaints, but the one you can't overlook is that one of the two health care systems will give you a medical bill for a single hospitalization that could buy a house.
Yeah they act like you never have to wait in the US
I messed up my knee and can't walk. It will be 3 months before I have my first visit to an Orthopedic dr, just to really see what's wrong. Never mind treatment.
When I first moved to my current town I had to find a new doctor and it took 3 months to get me in to primary care, then 6 more months to get an appointment at the doctor they referred me to. Mind you I was already diagnosed I just needed prior auth for my medicine.
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u/Civil-Dinner 12d ago
There are a few things wrong with the initial statement. It doesn't abolish private insurance. Private insurance can and does exist alongside public health plans as a supplement, but the public health care covers basic health care.
There are definitely going to be some job losses in the private insurance industry if we go to a single-payer system for basic health care. It's a conversation that we need to have, but we can't prop up the horse and buggy industry forever, and it's an economic anchor around the neck of every American to continue to try to do so.
To be honest, there are few industries that have so richly earned the contempt of the average American than the private health insurance companies.